Ryan spoke to Mark Stern, executive vice president of original content for Syfy, who said the decision to reduce the order for Season 1 from 20 to 19 episodes was a financial one, which resulted from the series in general being more expensive than originally expected. Stern said that Caprica is "a more elaborate production" than Battlestar, noting that the spaceship-set BSG mostly filmed inside soundstages and on pre-existing sets, while the planet-bound Caprica has required a lot more on-location shooting.

"We always knew it would be a challenge to bring it in on budget, and the deeper we got into it, the more we realized that if we [stuck to the budget too closely], it was not going to be satisfying," Stern told Ryan. "We were cutting corners and we weren't happy with that and the executive producers weren't happy with that." Stern says the show's executive producers didn't feel they could comfortably cut two episodes from the season, but were able to reconfigure the end of the season to cut one.

As to rumors of trouble behind the scenes at Caprica, Ryan says Stern and other sources tell her there have been the normal "creative growing pains associated with any first-year program." Jane Espenson, a Battlestar and Buffy alum, is executive producing the series, along with Ron Moore and David Eick and early reports indicated the plan was for Moore and Espenson to somewhat run the writers room together, with Espenson gradually taking the reins. Recently however, Desperate Housewives veteran Kevin Murphy joined Caprica as an Executive Producer, and has "been taking the lead on breaking stories," says Ryan.

But Stern notes, "Ron, Jane and David are still very much in that mix. Every show has to find its voice and figure out what it wants to be. Every show has to find out which characters pop and which story lines play. There were some growing pains as they found the right balance of stories and characters."

Click on Ryan's full piece to see more of what Stern has to say about Caprica. Ryan also debuted the key art poster for Caprica, seen below.